Information by Country

Global Section:

New UNGEI Evaluation Report Highlights Achievements and Challenges

NEW YORK, USA, 1 MAY 2012 – The important findings and recommendations of the global, regional, and country-level evaluation of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI), conducted in 2011, have been recently published in a new report, the Formative Evaluation of The United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative. The findings will be critical in charting the course of UNGEI in the future.

The evaluation, commissioned by the UNGEI Global Advisory Committee (GAC) in 2010, was conducted ten years after the anniversary of the establishment of UNGEI. The purpose was to establish a baseline for the partnership and to document achievements and challenges in the three UNGEI outcome areas: policy and advocacy for girls’ education and gender equality; good practice identification and dissemination; and partnership establishment.

The evaluation report’s conclusions show the immense and importance of UNGEI worldwide, such as the overall conclusion that UNGEI has established itself as a recognized partnership and has made significant progress towards achieving its intended outcomes. The evaluation report also identifies potential areas for further development, among them the improvement of consistent monitoring of progress on girls’ education at regional and country levels.

The evaluation report offers several key recommendations. The first urges UNGEI to make policy advocacy a main priority and to better equip itself to be a stronger advocate for girls’ education and gender equality. Other recommendations include: developing a priority plan of activities and publications aligned with UNGEI’s medium-term agenda in policy advocacy; strengthening its work on good practices; enhancing the capacity and relevance of UNGEI’s regional work; and further strengthening national-level partnerships.

Following the release of the global evaluation report, the GAC issued a four-page response, in which it accepted the evaluation findings and recommendations “as an important contribution to UNGEI’s work in 2012 and beyond”. The GAC said the evaluation report “confirms that over the last 10 years UNGEI has successfully established itself as a recognized partnership and advocate for girls’ education at the global, regional and country levels” and called the evaluation “a rich and valuable resource to support UNGEI’s on-going process of reform”.

The GAC acknowledged that some findings of the evaluation report “were challenging and require careful consideration” while others “fail to capture the full complexity of the partnership, and will require further analysis”. The GAC said it “will consider the evaluation findings and recommendations seriously as we undertake a process of strategic review and planning,” which will be the focus of the GAC meeting in Kampala, Uganda, this month.